White Teeth

9 Mutiny!

To Alsana’s mind the real difference between people was not colour. Nor did it lie in gender, faith, their relative ability to dance to a syncopated rhythm or open their fists to reveal a handful of gold coins. The real difference was far more fundamental. It was in the earth. It was in the sky. You could divide the whole of humanity into two distinct camps, as far as she was concerned, simply by asking them to complete a very simple questionnaire, of the kind you find in Woman’s Own on a Tuesday:

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?

(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?

(c) Is there a chance (and please tick the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair’s breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a keyring or a hairclip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure of eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hated, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There’s nothing to stop you – or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

It is different for the people of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal. They live under the invisible finger of random disaster, of flood and cyclone, hurricane and mud-slide. Half the time half their country lies under water; generations wiped out as regularly as clockwork; individual life expectancy an optimistic fifty-two, and they are coolly aware that when you talk about apocalypse, when you talk about random death en masse, well, they are leading the way in that particular field, they will be the first to go, the first to slip Atlantis-like down to the seabed when the pesky polar ice-caps begin to shift and melt. It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God’s idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy. You don’t need to give out questionnaires to Bengalis. The facts of disaster are the facts of their lives. Between Alsana’s sweet sixteenth birthday (1971), for example, and the year she stopped speaking directly to her husband (1985), more people died in Bangladesh, more people perished in the winds and the rain, than in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden put together. A million people lost lives that they had learnt to hold lightly in the first place.

And this is what Alsana really held against Samad, if you want the truth, more than the betrayal, more than the lies, more than the basic facts of a kidnap: that Magid should learn to hold his life lightly. Even though he was relatively safe up there in the Chittagong Hills, the highest point of that low-lying, flatland country, still she hated the thought that Magid should be as she had once been: holding on to a life no heavier than a paisa coin, wading thoughtlessly through floods, shuddering underneath the weight of black skies…

Naturally, she became hysterical. Naturally, she tried to get him back. She spoke to the relevant authorities. The relevant authorities said things like, ‘To be honest, love, we’re more worried about them coming in’ or ‘To tell you the truth, if it was your husband who arranged the trip, there’s not a great deal that we – ’, so she put the phone down. After a few months she stopped ringing. She went to Wembley and Whitechapel in despair and sat in the houses of relatives for epic weekends of weeping and eating and commiserations, but her gut told her that though the curry was sound, the commiserations were not all they seemed. For there were those who were quietly pleased that Alsana Iqbal, with her big house and her blacky-white friends and her husband who looked like Omar Sharif and her son who spoke like the Prince of Wales, was now living in doubt and uncertainty like the rest of them, learning to wear misery like old familiar silk. There was a certain satisfaction in it, even as Zinat (who never revealed her role in the deed) reached over the chair arm to take Alsana’s hand in her sympathetic claws. ‘Oh, Alsi, I just keep thinking what a shame it is that he had to take the good one! He was so very clever and so beautifully behaved! You didn’t have to worry about drugs and dirty girls with that one. Only the price of spectacles with all that reading.’

Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don’t ever underestimate people, don’t ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt. Alsana sensed all these and more at the other end of her telephone line as the calls flooded in – 28 May 1985 – to inform her of, to offer commiserations for, the latest cyclone.

‘Alsi, I simply had to call. They say there are so many bodies floating in the Bay of Bengal…’

‘I just heard the latest on the radio – ten thousand!’

‘And the survivors are floating on rooftops while the sharks and crocodiles snap at their heels.’

‘It must be terrible, Alsi, not knowing, not being sure…’

For six days and six nights, Alsana did not know, was not sure. During this period she read extensively from the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and tried hard to believe his assurances (Night’s darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn), but she was, at heart, a practical woman and found poetry no comfort. For those six days her life was a midnight thing, a hair’s breadth from the witching hour. But on the seventh day came light: the news arrived that Magid was fine, suffering only a broken nose delivered by a vase which had fallen from its perilous station on a high shelf in a mosque, blown over in the first breath of the first winds (and keep one eye on that vase, please, it is the same vase that will lead Magid by the nose to his vocation). It was only the servants, having two days earlier taken a secret supply of gin and piled into the family’s dilapidated transit van on a pleasure trip to Dhaka, who were now floating belly-up in the Jamuna River as fish finned-silver stared up at them, pop-eyed and bemused.

Samad was triumphant. ‘You see? He’ll come to no harm in Chittagong! Even better news, he was in a mosque. Better he break his nose in a mosque than in a Kilburn fight! It is exactly as I had hoped. He is learning the old ways. Is he not learning the old ways?’

Alsana thought for a moment. Then she said: ‘Maybe, Samad Miah.’

‘What do you mean, “maybe”?’

‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not.’

Alsana had decided to stop speaking directly to her husband. Through the next eight years she would determine never to say yes to him, never to say no to him, but rather to force him to live like she did – never knowing, never being sure, holding Samad’s sanity to ransom, until she was paid in full with the return of her number-one-son-eldest-by-two-minutes, until she could once more put a chubby hand through his thick hair. That was her promise, that was her curse upon Samad, and it was exquisite revenge. At times it very nearly drove him to the brink, to the kitchen-knife stage, to the medicine cabinet. But Samad was the kind of person too stubborn to kill himself if it meant giving someone else satisfaction. He hung on in there. Alsana turning over in her sleep, muttering, ‘Just bring him back, Mr Idiot… if it’s driving you nutso, just bring my baby back.’

But there was no money to bring Magid back even if Samad had been inclined to wave the white dhoti. He learnt to live with it. It got to the point where if somebody said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Samad in the street or in the restaurant, he hardly knew how to respond, he had come to forget what those two elegant little signifiers meant. He never heard them from Alsana’s lips. Whatever the question in the Iqbal house, there would never again be a straight answer:

‘Alsana, have you seen my slippers?’

‘Possibly, Samad Miah.’

‘What time is it?’

‘It could be three, Samad Miah, but Allah knows it could also be four.’

‘Alsana, where have you put the remote control?’

‘It is as likely to be in the drawer, Samad Miah, as it is behind the sofa.’

And so it went.

Sometime after the May cyclone, the Iqbals received a letter from their elder-son-by-two-minutes, written in a careful hand on exercise paper and folded around a recent photograph. It was not the first time he had written, but Samad saw something different in this letter, something that excited him and validated the unpopular decision he had made; some change of tone, some suggestion of maturity, of growing Eastern wisdom; and, having read it carefully in the garden first, he took great pleasure in bringing it back to the kitchen and reading it aloud to Clara and Alsana, who were drinking peppermint tea.

‘Listen: here he says, “Yesterday, grandfather hit Tamim (he is the houseboy) with a belt until his bottom was redder than a tomato. He said Tamim had stolen some candles (it’s true. I saw him do it!), and this was what he got for it. He says sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it is Allah’s turn or his own. I hope one day I will be a wise man.” Do you hear that? He wants to be a wise man. How many kids in that school do you know who want to be wise men?’

‘Maybe none, Samad Miah. Maybe all.’

Samad scowled at his wife and continued, ‘And here, here where he talks about his nose: “It seems to me that a vase should not be in such a silly place where it can fall and break a boy’s nose. It should be somebody’s fault and somebody should be punished (but not a bottom smack unless they were small and not a grown-up. If they were younger than twelve). When I grow up I think I should like to make sure vases are not put in such silly places where they can be dangerous and I would complain about other dangerous things too (by the way, my nose is fine now!).” See?’

Clara frowned. ‘See what?’

‘Clearly he disapproves of iconography in the mosque, he dislikes all heathen, unnecessary, dangerous decoration! A boy like that is destined for greatness, isn’t he?’

‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not.’

‘Maybe he’ll go into government, maybe the law,’ suggested Clara.

‘Rubbish! My son is for God, not men. He is not fearful of his duty. He is not fearful to be a real Bengali, a proper Muslim. Here he tells me the goat in the photograph is dead. “I helped to kill the goat, Abba,” he says. “It kept on moving some time after we had split it in two.” Is that a boy who is fearful?’

It clearly being incumbent upon someone to say no, Clara said it with little enthusiasm and reached for the photograph Samad was passing her. There was Magid, dressed in his customary grey, standing next to the doomed goat with the old house behind him.

‘Oh! Look at his nose! Look at the break. He’s got a Roman nose, now. He looks like a little aristocrat, like a little Englishman. Look, Millat.’ Clara put the photo under Millat’s smaller, flatter nose. ‘You two don’t look so much like twins any more.’

‘He looks,’ said Millat after a cursory glance, ‘like a chief.’

Samad, never au fait with the language of the Willesden streets, nodded soberly and patted his son’s hair. ‘It is good that you see the difference between you two boys, Millat, now rather than later.’ Samad glared at Alsana as she spun an index finger in a circle by her temple, as she tapped the side of her head: crazee, nutso. ‘Others may scoff, but you and I know that your brother will lead others out of the wilderness. He will be a leader of tribes. He is a natural chief.’

Millat laughed so loud at this, so hard, so uncontrollably, that he lost his footing, slipped on a wash cloth and broke his nose against the sink.

Two sons. One invisible and perfect, frozen at the pleasant age of nine, static in a picture frame while the television underneath him spewed out all the shit of the eighties – Irish bombs, English riots, transatlantic stalemates – above which mess the child rose untouchable and unstained, elevated to the status of ever smiling Buddha, imbued with serene Eastern contemplation; capable of anything, a natural leader, a natural Muslim, a natural chief – in short, nothing but an apparition. A ghostly daguerreotype formed from the quicksilver of the father’s imagination, preserved by the salt solution of maternal tears. This son stood silent, distant and was ‘presumed well’, like one of Her Majesty’s colonial island outposts, stuck in an eternal state of original naivety, perpetual pre-pubescence. This son Samad could not see. And Samad had long learnt to worship what he could not see.

As for the son he could see, the one who was under his feet and in his hair, well, it is best not to get Samad started up on that subject, the subject of The Trouble with Millat, but here goes: he is the second son, late like a bus, late like cheap postage, the slowcoach, the catch-up-kid, losing that first race down the birth canal, and now simply a follower by genetic predisposition, by the intricate design of Allah, the loser of two vital minutes that he would never make up, not in those all-seeing parabolic mirrors, not in those glassy globes of the godhead, not in his father’s eyes.

Now, a more melancholy child than Millat, a more deep-thinking child, might have spent the rest of his life hunting these two minutes and making himself miserable, chasing the elusive quarry, laying it finally at his father’s feet. But what his father said about him did not concern Millat all that much: he knew himself to be no follower, no chief, no wanker, no sell-out, no fuckwit – no matter what his father said. In the language of the street Millat was a rudeboy, a badman, at the forefront, changing image as often as shoes; sweet-as, safe, wicked, leading kids up hills to play football, downhill to rifle fruit machines, out of schools, into video shops. In Rocky Video, Millat’s favourite haunt, run by an unscrupulous coke-dealer, you got porn when you were fifteen, 18s when you were eleven, and snuff movies under the counter for five quid. Here was where Millat really learnt about fathers. Godfathers, blood-brothers, pacinodeniros, men in black who looked good, who talked fast, who never waited a (mutherfuckin’) table, who had two, fully functioning, gun-toting hands. He learnt that you don’t need to live under flood, under cyclone, to get a little danger, to be a wise man. You go looking for it. Aged twelve, Millat went out looking for it, and though Willesden Green is no Bronx, no South Central, he found a little, he found enough. He was arsey and mouthy, he had his fierce good looks squashed tightly inside him like a jack-in-a-box set to spring aged thirteen, at which point he graduated from leader of zit-faced boys to leader of women. The Pied Piper of Willesden Green, smitten girls trailing behind him, tongues out, breasts pert, falling into pools of heartbreak… and all because he was the BIGGEST and the BADDEST, living his young life in CAPITALS: he smoked first, he drank first, he even lost it – IT! – aged thirteen and a half. OK, so he didn’t FEEL much or TOUCH much, it was MOIST and CONFUSING, he lost IT without even knowing where IT went, but he still lost IT because there was no doubt, NONE, that he was the best of the rest, on any scale of juvenile delinquency he was the shining light of the teenage community, the DON, the BUSINESS, the DOG’S GENITALIA, a street boy, a leader of tribes. In fact, the only trouble with Millat was that he loved trouble. And he was good at it. Wipe that. He was great.

Still, there was much discussion – at home, at school, in the various kitchens of the widespread Iqbal/Begum clan – about The Trouble with Millat, mutinous Millat aged thirteen, who farted in mosque, chased blondes and smelt of tobacco, and not just Millat but all the children: Mujib (fourteen, criminal record for joyriding), Khandakar (sixteen, white girlfriend, wore mascara in the evenings), Dipesh (fifteen, marijuana), Kurshed (eighteen, marijuana and very baggy trousers), Khaleda (seventeen, sex before marriage with Chinese boy), Bimal (nineteen, doing a diploma in Drama); what was wrong with all the children, what had gone wrong with these first descendants of the great ocean-crossing experiment? Didn’t they have everything they could want? Was there not a substantial garden area, regular meals, clean clothes from Marks ’n’ Sparks, A-class top-notch education? Hadn’t the elders done their best? Hadn’t they all come to this island for a reason? To be safe. Weren’t they safe?

‘Too safe,’ Samad explained, patiently consoling one or other weeping, angry ma or baba, perplexed and elderly dadu or dida, ‘they are too safe in this country, accha? They live in big plastic bubbles of our own creation, their lives all mapped out for them. Personally, you know I would spit on Saint Paul, but the wisdom is correct, the wisdom is really Allah’s: put away childish things. How can our boys become men when they are never challenged like men? Hmm? No doubt about it, on reflection, sending Magid back was the best thing. I would recommend it.’

At which point, the assembled weepers and moaners all look mournfully at the treasured picture of Magid and goat. They sit mesmerized, like Hindus waiting for a stone cow to cry, until a visible aura seems to emanate from the photo: goodness and bravery through adversity, through hell and high water; the true Muslim boy; the child they never had. Pathetic as it was, Alsana found it faintly amusing, the tables having turned, no one weeping for her, everyone weeping for themselves and their children, for what the terrible eighties were doing to them both. These gatherings were like last-ditch political summits, they were like desperate meetings of government and church behind closed doors while the mutinous mob roamed wild on the streets, smashed windows. A distance was establishing itself, not simply between fathersons, oldyoung, borntherebornhere, but between those who stayed indoors and those who ran riot outside.

‘Too safe, too easy,’ repeated Samad, as great-aunt Bibi wiped Magid lovingly with some Mr Sheen. ‘A month back home would sort each and every one of them out.’

But the fact was Millat didn’t need to go back home: he stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden. In his mind he was as much there as he was here. He did not require a passport to live in two places at once, he needed no visa to live his brother’s life and his own (he was a twin after all). Alsana was the first to spot it. She confided to Clara: By God, they’re tied together like a cat’s cradle, connected like a see-saw, push one end, other goes up, whatever Millat sees, Magid saw and vice versa! And Alsana only knew the incidentals: similar illnesses, simultaneous accidents, pets dying continents apart. She did not know that while Magid watched the 1985 cyclone shake things from high places, Millat was pushing his luck along the towering wall of the cemetery in Fortune Green; that on 10 February 1988, as Magid worked his way through the violent crowds of Dhaka, ducking the random blows of those busy settling an election with knives and fists, Millat held his own against three sotted, furious, quick-footed Irishmen outside Biddy Mulligan’s notorious Kilburn public house. Ah, but you are not convinced by coincidence? You want fact fact fact? You want brushes with the Big Man with black hood and scythe? OK: on the 28th of April, 1989, a tornado whisked the Chittagong kitchen up into the sky, taking everything with it except Magid, left miraculously curled up in a ball on the floor. Now, segue to Millat, five thousand miles away, lowering himself down upon legendary sixth-former Natalia Cavendish (whose body is keeping a dark secret from her); the condoms are unopened in a box in his back pocket; but somehow he will not catch it; even though he is moving rhythmically now, up and in, deeper and sideways, dancing with death.

Three days:

15 October 1987

Even when the lights went out and the wind was beating the shit out of the double glazing, Alsana, a great believer in the oracle that is the BBC, sat in a nightie on the sofa, refusing to budge.

‘If that Mr Fish says it’s OK, it’s damn well OK. He’s BBC, for God’s sake!’

Samad gave up (it was almost impossible to change Alsana’s mind about the inherent reliability of her favoured English institutions, amongst them: Princess Anne, Blu-Tack, Children’s Royal Variety Performance, Eric Morecambe, Woman’s Hour). He got the torch from the kitchen drawer and went upstairs, looking for Millat.

‘Millat? Answer me, Millat! Are you there?’

‘Maybe, Abba, maybe not.’

Samad followed the voice to the bathroom and found Millat chin-high in dirty pink soap suds, reading Viz.

‘Ah, Dad, wicked. Torch. Shine it over here so I can read.’

‘Never mind that.’ Samad tore the comic from his son’s hands. ‘There’s a bloody hurricane blowing and your crazy mother intends to sit here until the roof falls in. Get out of the bath. I need you to go to the shed and find some wood and nails so that we can-’

‘But Abba, I’m butt-naked!’

‘Don’t split the hairs with me – this is an emergency. I want you to-’

An almighty ripping noise, like something being severed at the roots and flung against a wall, came from outside.

Two minutes later and the family Iqbal were standing regimental in varying states of undress, looking out through the long kitchen window on to a patch in the lawn where the shed used to be. Millat clicked his heels three times and hammed it up with cornershop accent, ‘O me O my. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’

‘All right, woman. Are you coming now?’

‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe.’

‘Dammit! I’m not in the mood for a referendum. We’re going to Archibald’s. Maybe they still have light. And there is safety in numbers. Both of you – get dressed, grab the essentials, the life or death things, and get in the car!’

Holding the car boot open against a wind determined to bring it down, Samad was first amused and then depressed by the items his wife and son determined essential, life or death things:

Samad slammed the boot down.

‘No pen knife, no edibles, no light sources. Bloody great. No prizes for guessing which one of the Iqbals is the war veteran. Nobody even thinks to pick up the Qurān. Key item in emergency situation: spiritual support. I am going back in there. Sit in the car and don’t move a muscle.’

Once in the kitchen Samad flashed his torch around: kettle, oven hob, teacup, curtain and then a surreal glimpse of the shed sitting happy like a treehouse in next door’s horsechestnut. He picked up the Swiss army knife he remembered leaving under the sink, collected his gold-plated, velvet-fringed Qurān from the living room and was about to leave when the temptation to feel the gale, to see a little of the formidable destruction, came over him. He waited for a lull in the wind and opened the kitchen door, moving tentatively into the garden, where a sheet of lightning lit up a scene of suburban apocalypse: oaks, cedars, sycamores, elms felled in garden after garden, fences down, garden furniture demolished. It was only his own garden, often ridiculed for its corrugated-iron surround, treeless interior and bed after bed of sickly smelling herbs, that had remained relatively intact.

He was just in the process of happily formulating some allegory regarding the bending Eastern reed versus the stubborn Western oak, when the wind reasserted itself, knocking him sideways and continuing along its path to the double glazing, which it cracked and exploded effortlessly, blowing glass inside, regurgitating everything from the kitchen out into the open air. Samad, a recently airborne collander resting on his ear, held his book tight to his chest and hurried to the car.

‘What are you doing in the driving seat?’

Alsana held on to the wheel firmly and talked to Millat via the rear-view mirror. ‘Will someone please tell my husband that I am going to drive. I grew up by the Bay of Bengal. I watched my mother drive through winds like these while my husband was poncing about in Delhi with a load of fairy college boys. I suggest my husband gets in the passenger seat and doesn’t fart unless I tell him to.’

Alsana drove at three miles an hour through the deserted, blacked-out high road while winds of 110 m.p.h. relentlessly battered the tops of the highest buildings.

‘England, this is meant to be! I moved to England so I wouldn’t have to do this. Never again will I trust that Mr Crab.’

‘Amma, it’s Mr Fish.’

‘From now on, he’s Mr Crab to me,’ snapped Alsana with a dark look. ‘BBC or no BBC.’

The lights had gone out at Archie’s, but the Jones household was prepared for every disastrous eventuality from tidal wave to nuclear fallout; by the time the Iqbals got there the place was lit with dozens of gas lamps, garden candles and night lights, the front door and windows had been speedily reinforced with hardboard, and the garden trees had their branches roped together.

‘It’s all about preparation,’ announced Archie, opening the door to the desperate Iqbals and their armfuls of belongings, like a DIY king welcoming the dispossessed. ‘I mean, you’ve got to protect your family, haven’t you? Not that you’ve failed in that depar – you know what I mean – ’sjust the way I see it: it’s me against the wind. If I’ve told you once, Ick-Ball, I’ve told you a million times: check the supporting walls. If they’re not in tip-top condition, you’re buggered, mate. You really are. And you’ve got to keep a pneumatic spanner in the house. Essential.’

‘That’s fascinating, Archibald. May we come in?’

Archie stepped aside. ‘ ’Course. Tell the truth, I was expecting you. You never did know a drill bit from a screw handle, Ick-Ball. Good with the theory, but never got the hang of the practicalities. Go on, up the stairs, mind the night lights – good idea that, eh? Hello, Alsi, you look lovely as ever; hello, Millboid, yer scoundrel. So Sam, out with it: what have you lost?’

Samad sheepishly recounted the damage so far.

‘Ah, now you see, that’s not your glazing – that’s fine, I put that in – it’s the frames. Just ripped out of that crumbling wall, I’ll bet.’

Samad grudgingly acknowledged this to be the case.

‘There’ll be worst to come, mark mine. Well, what’s done is done. Clara and Irie are in the kitchen. We’ve got a Bunsen burner going, and grub’s up in a minute. But what a bloody storm, eh? Phone’s out. ’Lectricity’s out. Never seen the likes of it.’

In the kitchen, a kind of artificial calm reigned. Clara was stirring some beans, quietly humming the tune to Buffalo Soldier. Irie was hunched over a notepad, writing her diary obsessively in the manner of thirteen-year-olds:

8.30 p.m. Millat just walked in. He’s sooo gorgeous but ultimately irritating! Tight jeans as usual. Doesn’t look at me (as usual, except in a FRIENDLY way). I’m in love with a fool (stupid me)! If only he had his brother’s brains… oh well, blah blah. I’ve got puppy love and puppy fat – aaaagh! Storm still crazy. Got to go. Will write later.

‘All right,’ said Millat.

‘All right,’ said Irie.

‘Crazy this, eh?’

‘Yeah, mental.’

‘Dad’s having a fit. House is torn to shit.’

‘Ditto. It’s been madness around here too.’

‘I’d like to know where you’d be without me, young lady,’ said Archie, banging another nail into some hardboard. ‘Best-protected house in Willesden, this is. Can’t hardly tell there’s a storm going on from here.’

‘Yeah,’ said Millat, sneaking a final thrilling peek through the window at the apoplectic trees before Archie blocked out the sky entirely with wood and nails. ‘That’s the problem.’

Samad clipped Millat round the ear. ‘Don’t you start in on the cheekiness. We know what we’re doing. You forget, Archibald and I have coped with extreme situations. Once you have fixed a five-man tank in the middle of a battlefield, your life at risk at every turn, bullets whizzing inches from your arse, while simultaneously capturing the enemy in the harshest possible conditions, let me be telling you, hurricane is little tiny small fry. You could do a lot worse than – yes, yes, very amusing I’m sure,’ muttered Samad, as the two children and the two wives feigned narcolepsy. ‘Who wants some of these beans? I’m dishing out.’

‘Someone tell a story,’ said Alsana. ‘It’s going to get oh so boring if we have to listen to old warhorse big mouths all night.’

‘Go on, Sam,’ said Archie with a wink. ‘Give us the one about Mangal Pande. That’s always good for a laugh.’

A clamour of Nooo’s, mimed slitting of throats and self-asphyxiation went round the assembled company.

‘The story of Mangal Pande,’ Samad protested, ‘is no laughing matter. He is the tickle in the sneeze, he is why we are the way we are, the founder of modern India, the big historical cheese.’

Alsana snorted. ‘Big fat nonsense. Every fool knows Gandhi-gee is the big cheese. Or Nehru. Or maybe Akbar, but he was crook-backed, and huge-nosed, I never liked him.’

‘Dammit! Don’t talk nonsense, woman. What do you know about it? Fact is: it is simply a matter of market economy, publicity, movie rights. The question is: are the pretty men with the big white teeth willing to play you, et cetera. Gandhi had Mr Kingsley – bully for him – but who will do Pande, eh? Pande’s not pretty enough, is he? Too Indian-looking, big nose, big eyebrows. That’s why I am always having to tell you ingrates a thing or two about Mangal Pande. Bottom line: if I don’t, nobody will.’

‘Look,’ said Millat, ‘I’ll do the short version. Great-grandfather-’

‘Your great-great-grandfather, stupid,’ corrected Alsana.

‘Whatever. Decides to fuck the English-’

‘Millat!’

‘To rebel against the English, all on his Jack-Jones, spliffed up to the eyeballs, tries to shoot his captain, misses, tries to shoot himself, misses, gets hung-’

‘Hanged,’ said Clara absent-mindedly.

‘Hanged or hung? I’ll get the dictionary,’ said Archie, laying down his hammer and climbing off the kitchen counter.

‘Whatever. End of story. Bor-ing.’

And now a mammoth tree – the kind endemic to North London, the ones that sprout three smaller trees along the trunk before finally erupting into glorious greenery, city-living for whole diaspora of magpie – a tree of this kind tore itself from the dog shit and the concrete, took one tottering step forward, swooned and collapsed; through the guttering, through the double glazing, through the hardboard, knocked over a gas lamp, and then landed in an absence that was Archie-shaped, for he had just left it.

Archie was the first to leap into action, throwing a towel on the small fire progressing along the cork kitchen tiles, while everyone else trembled and wept and checked each other for injury. Then Archie, visibly shaken by this blow to his DIY supremacy, reclaimed control over the elements, tying some of the branches with kitchen rags and ordering Millat and Irie to go around the house, putting out the gas lamps.

‘We don’t want to burn ourselves to death, now do we? I better find some black plastic and gaffer tape. Do something about this.’

Samad was incredulous. ‘Do something about it, Archibald? I fail to see how some gaffer tape will change the fact there is a half a tree in the kitchen.’

‘Man, I’m terrified,’ stuttered Clara, after a few minutes’ silence, as the storm lulled. ‘The quiet is always a bad sign. My grandmother – God rest her – she always said that. The quiet is just God pausing to take a breath before he shouts all over again. I think we should go into the other room.’

‘That was the only tree on this side. Best stay in here. Worst’s done here. Besides,’ said Archie, touching his wife’s arm aff ectionately, ‘you Bowdens have seen worse than this! Your mother was born in a bloody earthquake, for Christ’s sake. 1907, Kingston’s falling apart and Hortense pops into the world. You wouldn’t see a little storm like this worrying her. Tough as nails, that one.’

‘Not toughness,’ said Clara quietly, standing up to look through the broken window at the chaos outside, ‘luck. Luck and faith.’

‘I suggest we pray,’ said Samad, picking up his novelty Qurān. ‘I suggest we acknowledge the might of the Creator as he does his worst this evening.’

Samad began flicking through and, finding what he wanted, brought it patrician-like under his wife’s nose, but she slammed it shut and glared at him. Ungodly Alsana, who was yet a nifty hand with the word of God (good schooling, proper parents, oh yes), lacking nothing but the faith, prepared to do what she did only in emergency: recite: ‘I do not serve what you worship, nor do you serve what I worship. I shall never serve what you worship, nor will you ever serve what I worship. You have your own religion, and I have mine. Sura 109, translation N. J. Dawood.’ Now, will someone,’ said Alsana, looking to Clara, ‘please remind my husband that he is not Mr Manilow and he does not have the songs that make the whole world sing. He will whistle his tune and I will whistle mine.’

Samad turned contemptuously from his wife and placed both hands rigidly on his book. ‘Who will pray with me?’

‘Sorry, Sam,’ came a muffled voice (Archie had his head in the cupboard and was searching for the bin bags). ‘Not really my cup of tea, either. Never been a church man. No offence.’

Five more minutes passed without the wind. Then the quiet burst and God shouted just as Ambrosia Bowden had told her granddaughter he would. Thunder went over the house like a dying man’s bile, lightning followed like his final malediction, and Samad closed his eyes.

‘Irie! Millat!’ called Clara, then Alsana. No answer. Standing bolt upright in the cupboard, smashing his head against the spice shelf, Archie said, ‘It’s been ten minutes. Oh blimey. Where are the kids?’

One kid was in Chittagong, being dared by a friend to take off his lungi and march through a renowned crocodile swamp; the other two had sneaked out of the house to feel the eye of the storm, and were walking against the wind as if thigh-high in water. They waded into Willesden recreation ground, where the following conversation took place.

‘This is incredible!’

‘Yeah, mental!’

‘You’re mental.’

‘What do you mean? I’m fine!’

‘No, you’re not. You’re always looking at me. And what were you writing? You’re such a nerd. You’re always writing.’

‘Nothing. Stuff. You know, diary stuff.’

‘You’ve got the blatant hots for me.’

‘I can’t hear you! Louder!’

‘THE HOTS! BLATANTLY! YOU CAN HEAR ME.’

‘I have not! You’re an egomaniac.’

‘You want my arse.’

‘Don’t be a wanker!’

‘Well, it’s no good, anyway. You’re getting a bit big. I don’t like big. You can’t have me.’

‘I wouldn’t want to, Mr Egomaniac.’

‘Plus: imagine what our kids would look like.’

‘I think they’d look nice.’

‘Browny-black. Blacky-brown. Afro, flat nose, rabbit teeth and freckles. They’d be freaks!’

‘You can talk. I’ve seen that picture of your grandad-’

‘GREAT-GREAT-GRANDAD.’

‘Massive nose, horrible eyebrows-’

‘That’s an artist’s impression, you chief.’

‘And they’d be crazy – he was crazy – your whole family’s crazy. It’s genetic.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever.’

‘And for your information, I don’t fancy you, anyway. You’ve got a bent nose. And you’re trouble. Who wants trouble?’

‘Well, watch out,’ said Millat, leaning forward, colliding with some buck teeth, slipping a tongue in momentarily, and then pulling back. ‘ ’Cos that’s all the trouble you’re getting.’

14 January 1989

Millat spread his legs like Elvis and slapped his wallet down on the counter. ‘One for Bradford, yeah?’

The ticket-man put his tired face close up to the glass. ‘Are you asking me, young man, or telling me?’

‘I just say, yeah? One for Bradford, yeah? You got some problem, yeah? Speaka da English? This is King’s Cross, yeah? One for Bradford, innit?’

Millat’s Crew (Rajik, Ranil, Dipesh and Hifan) sniggered and shuffled behind him, joining in on the yeahs like some kind of backing group.

‘Please?’

‘Please what, yeah? One for Bradford, yeah? You get me? One for Bradford. Chief.’

‘And would that be a return? For a child?’

‘Yeah, man. I’m fifteen, yeah? ’Course I want a return, I’ve got a bāÅ-ii to get back to like everybody else.’

‘That’ll be seventy-five pounds, then, please.’

This was met with displeasure by Millat and Millat’s Crew.

‘You what? Takin’ liberties! Seventy – chaaaa, man. That’s moody. I ain’t payin’ no seventy-five pounds!’

‘Well, I’m afraid that’s the price. Maybe next time you mug some poor old lady,’ said the ticket-man, looking pointedly at the chunky gold that fell from Millat’s ears, wrists, fingers and from around his neck, ‘you could stop in here first before you get to the jewellery store.’

‘Liberties!’ squealed Hifan.

‘He’s cussin’ you, yeah?’ confirmed Ranil.

‘You better tell ’im,’ warned Rajik.

Millat waited a minute. Timing was everything. Then he turned around, stuck his arse in the air, and farted long and loud in the ticket-man’s direction.

The Crew, on cue: ‘Somokāmi!’

‘What did you call me? You – what did you say? You little bastards. Can’t tell me in English? Have to talk your Paki language?’

Millat slammed his fist so hard on the glass that it reverberated down the booths to the ticket-man down the other end selling tickets to Milton Keynes.

‘First: I’m not a Paki, you ignorant fuck. And second: you don’t need translator, yeah? I’ll give it to you straight. You’re a fucking faggot, yeah? Queer boy, poofter, batty-rider, shit-dick.’

There was nothing Millat’s Crew prided themselves on more than the number of euphemisms they could offer for homosexuality.

‘Arse-bandit, fairy-fucker, toilet-trader.’

‘You want to thank God for the glass between us, boy.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thank Allah, yeah? I hope he fucks you up wicked, yeah? We’re going to Bradford to sort out the likes of you, yeah? Chief!’

Halfway up platform 12, about to board a train they had no tickets for, a King’s Cross security guy stopped Millat’s Crew to ask them a question. ‘You boys not looking for any trouble, are you?’

The question was fair. Millat’s Crew looked like trouble. And, at the time, a crew that looked like trouble in this particular way had a name, they were of a breed: Raggastani.

It was a new breed, just recently joining the ranks of the other street crews: Becks, B-boys, Indie kids, wide-boys, ravers, rude-boys, Acidheads, Sharons, Tracies, Kevs, Nation Brothers, Raggas and Pakis; manifesting itself as a kind of cultural mongrel of the last three categories. Raggastanis spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; Kung Fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the Bad-aaaass back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani. People had fucked with Rajik back in the days when he was into chess and wore V-necks. People had fucked with Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class and carefully copied all teacher’s comments into his book. People had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress in the playground. People had even fucked with Millat, with his tight jeans and his white rock. But no one fucked with any of them any more because they looked like trouble. They looked like trouble in stereo. Naturally, there was a uniform. They each dripped gold and wore bandanas, either wrapped around their foreheads or tied at the joint of an arm or leg. The trousers were enormous, swamping things, the left leg always inexplicably rolled up to the knee; the trainers were equally spectacular, with tongues so tall they obscured the entire ankle; baseball caps were compulsory, low slung and irremovable, and everything, everything, everything was Nike^TM; wherever the five of them went the impression they left behind was of one gigantic swoosh, one huge mark of corporate approval. And they walked in a very particular way, the left side of their bodies assuming a kind of loose paralysis that needed carrying along by the right side; a kind of glorified, funky limp like the slow, padding movement that Yeats imagined for his rough millennial beast. Ten years early, while the happy acid heads danced through the Summer of Love, Millat’s Crew were slouching towards Bradford.

‘No trouble, yeah?’ said Millat to the security guy.

‘Just going – ’ began Hifan.

‘To Bradford,’ said Rajik.

‘For business, yeah?’ explained Dipesh.

‘See-ya! Bidāyo!’ called Hifan, as they slipped into the train, gave him the finger, and shoved their arses up against the closing doors.

‘Tax the window seat, yeah? Nice. I’ve blatantly got to have a fag in here, yeah? I’m fuckin’ wired, yeah? This whole business, man. This fuckin’ geezer, man. He’s a fuckin’ coconut – I’d like to fuck him up, yeah?’

‘Is he actually gonna be there?’

All serious questions were always addressed to Millat, and Millat always answered the group as a whole. ‘No way. He ain’t going to be there. Just brothers going to be there. It’s a fucking protest, you chief, why’s he going to go to a protest against himself?’

‘I’m just saying,’ said Ranil, wounded, ‘I’d fuck him up, yeah? If he was there, you know. Dirty fucking book.’

‘It’s a fucking insult!’ said Millat, spitting some gum against the window. ‘We’ve taken it too long in this country. And now we’re getting it from our own, man. Rhas clut! He’s a fucking bādor, white man’s puppet.’

‘My uncle says he can’t even spell,’ said a furious Hifan, the most honestly religious of the lot. ‘And he dares to talk about Allah!’

‘Allah’ll fuck him up, yeah?’ cried Rajik, the least intelligent, who thought of God as some kind of cross between Monkey-Magic and Bruce Willis. ‘He’ll kick him in the balls. Dirty book.’

‘You read it?’ asked Ranil, as they whizzed past Finsbury Park.

There was a general pause.

Millat said, ‘I haven’t exackly read it exackly – but I know all about that shit, yeah?’

To be more precise, Millat hadn’t read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of other books; could not pick out the writer in a line-up of other writers (irresistible, this line-up of offending writers: Socrates, Protagoras, Ovid and Juvenal, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, D. H. Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flashbulb). But he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelt of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a film-maker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands.

‘So… you ain’t read it?’ asked Ranil nervously.

‘Look: you best believe I ain’t buying that shit, man. No way, star.’

‘Me neither,’ said Hifan.

‘True star,’ said Rajik.

‘Fucking nastiness,’ said Ranil.

‘Twelve ninety-five, you know!’ said Dipesh.

‘Besides,’ said Millat, with a tone of finality despite his high-rising terminals, ‘you don’t have to read shit to know that it’s blasphemous, you get me?’

Back in Willesden, Samad Iqbal was expressing the very same sentiment loudly over the evening news.

‘I don’t need to read it. The relevant passages have been photocopied for me.’

‘Will someone remind my husband,’ said Alsana, speaking to the newsreader, ‘that he does not even know what the bloody book is about because the last thing he read was the bloody A- Z.’

‘I’m going to ask you one more time to shut up so I can watch the news.’

‘I can hear screaming but it does not appear to be my voice.’

‘Can’t you understand, woman? This is the most important thing to happen to us in this country, ever. It’s crisis point. It’s the tickle in the sneeze. It’s big time.’ Samad hit the volume button a few times with his thumb. ‘This woman – Moira whateverhernameis – she mumbles. Why is she reading news if she can’t speak properly?’

Moira, turned up suddenly in mid-sentence, said, ‘… the writer denies blasphemy, and argues that the book concerns the struggle between secular and religious views of life.’

Samad snorted. ‘What struggle! I don’t see any struggle. I get on perfectly OK. All grey cells in good condition. No emotional difficulties.’

Alsana laughed bitterly. ‘My husband fights the Third World War every single bloody day in his head, so does everybody-’

‘No, no, no. No struggle. What’s he on about, eh? He can’t wangle out of it by being rational. Rationality! Most overrated Western virtue! Oh no. Fact is, he is simply offensive – he has offended-’

‘Look,’ Alsana cut in. ‘When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Mohona Hossain hates Divargiit Singh. Hates all his movies. Hates him with a passion. She likes that other fool with the eyelashes like a lady! But we compromise. Never once have I burned a single video of hers.’

‘Hardly the same thing, Mrs Iqbal, hardly the same kettle with fish in it.’

‘Oh, passions are running high at the Women’s Committee – shows how much Samad Iqbal knows. But I am not like Samad Iqbal. I restrain myself. I live. I let live.’

‘It is not a matter of letting others live. It is a matter of protecting one’s culture, shielding one’s religion from abuse. Not that you’d know anything about that, naturally. Always too busy with this Hindi brain popcorn to pay any attention to your own culture!’

‘My own culture? And what is that please?’

‘You’re a Bengali. Act like one.’

‘And what is a Bengali, husband, please?’

‘Get out of the way of the television and look it up.’

Alsana took out BALTIC- BRAIN, number three of their 24-set Reader’s Digest Encyclopedia, and read from the relevant section:

The vast majority of Bangladesh’s inhabitants are Bengalis, who are largely descended from Indo-Aryans who began to migrate into the country from the west thousands of years ago and who mixed within Bengal with indigenous groups of various racial stocks. Ethnic minorities include the Chakma and Mogh, Mongoloid peoples who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts District; the Santal, mainly descended from migrants from present-day India; and the Biharis, non-Bengali Muslims who migrated from India after the partition.

‘Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans… it looks like I am Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show,’ said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, ‘you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale!’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re out of your depth.’

Alsana held up the encyclopedia. ‘Oh, Samad Miah. You want to burn this too?’

‘Look: I’ve no time to play right now. I am trying to listen to a very important news story. Serious goings on in Bradford. So, if you don’t mind-’

‘Oh dear God!’ screamed Alsana, the smile leaving her face, falling to her knees in front of the television, tracing her finger past the burning book to the face she recognized, smiling up at her through light tubes, her pixilated second-son beneath her picture-framed first. ‘What is he doing? Is he crazy? Who does he think he is? What on earth is he doing there? He’s meant to be in school! Has the day come when the babies are burning the books, has it? I don’t believe it!’

‘Nothing to do with me. Tickle in the sneeze, Mrs Iqbal,’ said Samad coolly, sitting back in his armchair. ‘Tickle in the sneeze.’

When Millat came home that evening, a great bonfire was raging in the back garden. All his secular stuff – four years’ worth of cool, pre- and post-Raggastani, every album, every poster, special-edition t-shirts, club fliers collected and preserved over two years, beautiful Air Max trainers, copies 20- 75 of 2000 AD Magazine, signed photo of Chuck D., impossibly rare copy of Slick Rick’s Hey Young World, Catcher in the Rye, his guitar, Godfather I and II, Mean Streets, Rumblefish, Dog Day Afternoon and Shaft in Africa – all had been placed on the funeral pyre, now a smouldering mound of ashes that was giving off fumes of plastic and paper, stinging the boy’s eyes that were already filled with tears.

‘Everyone has to be taught a lesson,’ Alsana had said, lighting the match with heavy heart some hours earlier. ‘Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later.’

10 November 1989

A wall was coming down. It was something to do with history. It was an historic occasion. No one really knew quite who had put it up or who was tearing it down or whether this was good, bad or something else; no one knew how tall it was, how long it was, or why people had died trying to cross it or whether they would stop dying in future, but it was educational all the same; as good an excuse for a get-together as any. It was a Thursday night, Alsana and Clara had cooked, and everybody was watching history on TV.

‘Who’s for more rice?’

Millat and Irie held out their plates, jostling for prime position.

‘What’s happening now?’ asked Clara, rushing back to her seat with a bowl of Jamaican fried dumplings, from which Irie snatched three.

‘Same, man,’ Millat grumbled. ‘Same. Same. Same. Dancing on the wall, smashing it with a hammer. Whatever. I wanna see what else is on, yeah?’

Alsana snatched the remote control and squeezed in between Clara and Archie. ‘Don’t you dare, mister.’

‘It’s educational,’ said Clara deliberately, her pad and paper on the arm rest, waiting to leap into action at the suggestion of anything edifying. ‘It’s the kind of thing we all should be watching.’

Alsana nodded and waited for two awkward-shaped bhajis to go down the gullet. ‘That’s what I try and tell the boy. Big business. Tip-top historic occasion. When your own little Iqbals tug at your trousers and ask you where you were when-’

‘I’ll say I was bored shitless watching it on TV.’

Millat got a thwack round the head for ‘shitless’ and another one for the impertinence of the sentiment. Irie, looking strangely like the crowd on top of the wall in her everyday garb of CND badges, graffiti-covered trousers and beaded hair, shook her head in saddened disbelief. She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.

‘That’s totally your problem, Mill. No interest in the outside world. I think this is amazing. They’re all free! After all this time, don’t you think that’s amazing? That after years under the dark cloud of Eastern communism they’re coming into the light of Western democracy, united,’ she said, quoting Newsnight faithfully. ‘I just think democracy is man’s greatest invention.’

Alsana, who felt personally that Clara’s child was becoming impossibly pompous these days, held up the head of a Jamaican fried fish in protest. ‘No, dearie. Don’t make that mistake. Potato peeler is man’s greatest invention. That or Poop-a-Scoop.’

‘What they want,’ said Millat, ‘is to stop pissing around wid dis hammer business and jus’ get some Semtex and blow de djam ting up, if they don’t like it, you get me? Be quicker, innit?’

‘Why do you talk like that?’ snapped Irie, devouring a dumpling. ‘That’s not your voice. You sound ridiculous!’

‘And you want to watch dem dumplings,’ said Millat, patting his belly. ‘Big ain’t beautiful.’

‘Oh, get lost.’

‘You know,’ murmured Archie, munching on a chicken wing, ‘I’m not so sure that it’s such a good thing. I mean, you’ve got to remember, me and Samad, we were there. And believe me, there’s a good reason to have it split in two. Divide and conquer, young lady.’

‘Jesus Christ, Dad. What are you on?’

‘He’s not on anything,’ said Samad severely. ‘You younger people forget why certain things were done, you forget their significance. We were there. Not all of us think fondly upon a united Germany. They were different times, young lady.’

‘What’s wrong with a load of people making some noise about their freedom? Look at them. Look at how happy they are.’

Samad looked at the happy people dancing on the wall and felt contempt and something more irritating underneath it that could have been jealousy.

‘It is not that I disagree with rebellious acts per se. It is simply that if you are to throw over an old order, you must be sure that you can offer something of substance to replace it; that is what Germany needs to understand. As an example, take my great-grandfather, Mangal Pande-’

Irie sighed the most eloquent sigh that had ever been sighed. ‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same.’

‘Irie!’ said Clara, because she felt she should.

Irie huffed. And puffed.

‘Well! He goes on like he knows everything. Everything’s always about him – and I’m trying to talk about now, today, Germany. I bet you,’ she said, turning to Samad, ‘I know more about it than you do. Go on. Try me. I’ve been studying it all term. Oh, and by the way: you weren’t there. You and Dad left in 1945. They didn’t do the wall until 1961.’

‘Cold War,’ said Samad sourly, ignoring her. ‘They don’t talk about hot war any more. The kind where men get killed. That’s where I learnt about Europe. It cannot be found in books.’

‘Oi-oi,’ said Archie, trying to diffuse a row. ‘You do know Last of the Summer Wine’s on in ten minutes? BBC Two.’

‘Go on,’ persisted Irie, kneeling up and turning around to face Samad. ‘Try me.’

‘The gulf between books and experience,’ intoned Samad solemnly, ‘is a lonely ocean.’

‘Right. You two talk such a load of sh-’

But Clara was too quick with a slap round the ear. ‘Irie!’

Irie sat back down, not so much defeated as exasperated and turned up the TV volume.

The 28-mile-long scar – the ugliest symbol of a divided world, East and West – has no meaning any more. Few people, including this reporter, thought to see it happen in their lifetimes, but last night, at the stroke of midnight, thousands lingering both sides of the wall gave a great roar and began to pour through checkpoints and to climb up and over it.

‘Foolishness. Massive immigration problem to follow,’ said Samad to the television, dipping a dumpling into some ketchup. ‘You just can’t let a million people into a rich country. Recipe for disaster.’

‘And who does he think he is? Mr Churchill-gee?’ laughed Alsana scornfully. ‘Original whitecliffsdover piesnmash jellyeels royalvariety britishbulldog, heh?’

‘Scar,’ said Clara, noting it down. ‘That’s the right word, isn’t it?’

‘Jesus Christ. Can’t any of you understand the enormity of what’s going on here? These are the last days of a regime. Political apocalypse, meltdown. It’s an historic occasion.’

‘So everyone keeps saying,’ said Archie, scouring the TV Times. ‘But what about The Krypton Factor, ITV? That’s always good, eh? ’Son now.’

‘And stop sayin’ “an historic”,’ said Millat, irritated at all the poncey political talk. ‘Why can’t you just say “a”, like everybody else, man? Why d’you always have to be so la di da?’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ (She loved him, but he was impossible.) ‘What possible fucking difference can it make?’

Samad rose out of his seat. ‘Irie! This is my house and you are still a guest. I won’t have that language in it!’

‘Fine! I’ll take it to the streets with the rest of the proletariat.’

‘That girl,’ tutted Alsana as her front door slammed. ‘Swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time.’

Millat sucked his teeth at his mother. ‘Don’t you start, man. What’s wrong with “a” encyclopedia? Why’s everyone in this house always puttin’ on fuckin’ airs?’

Samad pointed to the door. ‘OK, mister. You don’t speak to your mother like that. You out too.’

‘I don’t think,’ said Clara quietly, after Millat had stormed up to his room, ‘that we should discourage the kids from having an opinion. It’s good that they’re free-thinkers.’

Samad sneered, ‘And you would know… what? You do a great deal of free-thinking? In the house all day, watching the television?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘With respect: the world is complex, Clara. If there’s one thing these children need to understand it is that one needs rules to survive it, not fancy.’

‘He’s right, you know,’ said Archie earnestly, ashing a fag in an empty curry bowl. ‘Emotional matters – then yes, that’s your department-’

‘Oh – women’s work!’ squealed Alsana, through a mouth full of curry. ‘Thank you so much, Archibald.’

Archie struggled to continue. ‘But you can’t beat experience, can you? I mean, you two, you’re young women still, in a way. Whereas we, I mean, we are, like, wells of experience the children can use, you know, when they feel the need. We’re like encyclopedias. You just can’t offer them what we can. In all fairness.’

Alsana put her palm on Archie’s forehead and stroked it lightly. ‘You fool. Don’t you know you’re left behind like carriage and horses, like candlewax? Don’t you know to them you’re old and smelly like yesterday’s fishnchip paper? I’ll be agreeing with your daughter on one matter of importance.’ Alsana stood up, following Clara, who had left at this final insult and marched tearfully into the kitchen. ‘You two gentlemen talk a great deal of the youknowwhat.’

Left alone, Archie and Samad acknowledged the desertion of both families by a mutual rolling of eyes, wry smiles. They sat quietly for a moment while Archie’s thumb flicked adeptly through An Historic Occasion, A Costume Drama Set in Jersey, Two Men Trying to Build a Raft in Thirty Seconds, A Studio Debate on Abortion, and back once more to An Historic Occasion.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

‘Home? Pub? O’Connell’s?’

Archie was about to reach into his pocket for a shiny ten pence when he realized there was no need.

‘O’Connell’s?’ said Archie.

‘O’Connell’s’ said Samad.